Notes on García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was both a journalist and a novelist. His writing emerged as a blend between the two roles. In fact, during a 1981 interview with The Paris Review, García Márquez remarked, “I don’t think there is any difference [between the novel and journalism]. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same.”

Whether fiction or nonfiction, his works all emanate this attitude. Journalism demands great storytelling, while fiction deserves to capture truth.

One of García Márquez’s greatest novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude, blends this historical realism with fictional mystery into a single imposing work, spanning seven generations of one family in an isolated Latin American town. Over the course of the novel, the Buendía family experiences fortunes and disasters. The town of Macondo is gradually exposed to outside influence—from gypsies to civil war to foreigners—and loses its idyllic luster.

Considered a work of magical realism, the novel blends fictional, dreamlike elements into a matter-of-fact narrative. The book retells significant parts of Colombian history, such as the Banana Massacre of 1928. Nevertheless, an unreal atmosphere demonstrates a key idea of the work: the blurriness of the truth.

By using fiction to depict these events, García Márquez reminds readers of this uncertainty. It also, however, allows him to morph the work into a meaningful mirror to the past and human experience. The vicissitudes and ultimate decline of the Buendía family chronicle the gamut of romance and tragedy, glory and despair. The novel feels intensely human.

But perhaps the most significant message from García Márquez lies at the very start in the title of this work: time and solitude.

The remoteness of Macondo begins our experience of solitude, which parallels García Márquez’s notion of the solitude of Latin America. As the story progresses, time feels increasingly meaningless. There is a cyclical pattern with which history repeats itself; Macondo is trapped in a vicious cycle.

By the end of the hundred years the novel chronicles, a natural conclusion still emerges. Macondo is destroyed, and this history of solitude comes to an end. The scene is, in a sense, similar to that before the town was founded, though the world around it has changed.

I’ve found that the ending bears a profound feeling of sorrow, having seen so many lives all end in nothing. Yet the atmosphere is also one of peace.

History is doomed to repeat itself unless the shackles of solitude are loosened. And thus, only at the conclusion can a new story begin.

These notes only scratch the surface of what One Hundred Years of Solitude has to offer. And Gabriel García Márquez’s 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature proves this depth. There are numerous other intricacies within, for which many, including myself, will surely revisit this masterpiece.